Facebook switches itself off and on again after GLOBAL meltdown

No longer a proper read-only book: World's economies bog down once again

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Facebook suffered a huge outage today that prevented millions of people from posting status updates on the giant advertising network for up to two hours.

The Register understands that the company had no choice but to get engineers to do the walk of shame to the server room and turn it off and on again.

Facebook said:

Earlier this morning, while performing some network maintenance, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 per cent. We're sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused.

As we reported earlier, Facebookers griped about their inability to post selfies, food notifications and vital "I'm on the bus" bulletins to the site for a number of hours.

The glitch meant that many were locked out from making comments, hitting the "like" button on posts and uploading photos, the better to make sure that Mark Zuckerberg has plenty of stuff to run ads next to.

Facebook may be claiming that the site is back up and running, but there remain reports of some service disruption.

El Reg understands that Facebook's system was crippled by the same network maintenance that led to a delay in bringing the service fully back to life again - perhaps while sysadmin types breathlessly waited for an update to complete.

Now that Facebook has beefed up its search function, we can perhaps all start to warn others in a very meta fashion:

"Don't Facebook 'Facebook' on Facebook, otherwise it will turn into just another book." ®